EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would win.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

MALL WONDER

Last-minute shoppers will be relieved to know that The Millcreek Mall...

...serving my beloved hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, was named "Best Hideout for a Zombie Apocalypse" last March by gambling site JeffBet, beating out even The Mall of America in Minnesota (which came in fifth on the list). More recently, Millcreek Mall was rated the seventh-best mall in America for Christmas shopping.

You can read how both distinctions come together in my novel, The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead...

...which is set at the Millcreek Mall, and whose hapless hero is indeed a frantic last-minute shopper.

A safe, zombie-free and Merry Christmas to all from Less Hat, Moorhead!

barbenheimerflowermoonemmaryanjustken…

The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I'm an enduringly proud founding member...

...has announced its 2023 Award winners and Top Ten list. As always, some of the selections represent my voting--I'm especially glad my colleagues agreed with me about Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers--others do not, but there's a lot of good acting and moviemaking represented on this list.

While I'm on the subject, I think the PFCS Awards need a name. The Pheenies? The Nixies? The Dry Heaties? Just spitballing...

I'll post my own Top Ten list after the New Year. Happy Holidays everybody!

FEEL THE BERNSTEIN

Now in the multiplexes; opening December 20 on Netflix:

Maestro--Bradley Cooper's imitation of Leonard Bernstein conducting is uncanny. Cooper captures Bernstein's histrionic, self-dramatizing, ecstatic style perfectly, and gets across how he used his gestures and facial expressions and body language not just to lead his musicians through a score but to tease the interpretation and intensity he wanted out of them.

The conducting scenes in this film, directed by Cooper from a script he wrote with Josh Singer, also suggest that the podium gave Bernstein a sense of liberation which he may have known in few other areas of his life. Cooper's performance, in general but particularly in these passages--especially a lengthy recreation of a celebrated performance of Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony"--is luminous.

I'll admit that it's taken me a while to come around where Bradley Cooper is concerned. But after A Star is Born and Nightmare Alley it was impossible to deny both his talent and the intelligence and heart with which he deploys it. Aided here by Kazu Hiro's amazing (and laughably controversial) prosthetic makeup, he gets across the conductor's mix of authority, of self-conscious, performative sophistication and of boyish wonder, and makes you see what made him beloved, both publicly and by his friends and family. You see what made him difficult, too.

Very wisely, Cooper chooses not to direct in the same florid manner that Bernstein conducted. Despite some flashy transitions, most of Maestro unfolds in long, sustained takes, beautifully shot by Matthew Libatique from a discreet distance; we're made almost into eavesdroppers at times. This directorial reserve balances the extravagant acting superbly.

The movie isn't a conventional biopic; there are no explanatory dates or places onscreen, no follow-up summary at the end, and only incidentally does it trace Bernstein's career highlights. The focus is on the relationship between Bernstein and the Costa Rican-born stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who married him in 1951. The other characters, though well-drawn and convincingly played--Sarah Silverman is a good fit as Bernstein's sister Shirley--are decidedly subordinate to the leads.

According to the film, Montealegre was well aware, going in, that Bernstein was a gay man (though his affairs were not exclusively same-sex even before she came along). "Let's give it a whirl," she says breezily to him toward the beginning, and you think, uh-oh.

On the whole, they don't seem to have done too badly; they had three lovely kids, sensational careers, countless friends, and they seem to have profoundly loved each other. But entering into a marriage with somebody of uncongenial sexuality cannot come without turbulence, and this can only be compounded when they're a titanic cultural legend.

It's possible that even the movie itself succumbs to this, a little. With her brittle yet mirthful, keenly observant, wholeheartedly engaged line readings, Mulligan is marvelous; the spine and centering force of the movie (she's top-billed in the credits, even over Cooper). But we learn far less of Montealegre's remarkable career or her activism than we do about Bernstein. The movie sees her in relation to him, and doesn't always make clear how formidable she was in her own right, not just within the marriage but in the world at large.  Even when part of the point of the movie is the perils of putting yourself in the shadow of a legend, the person at the podium tends to get the attention.

PROPHET SHARE

Opening this weekend:

The Oath--The warrior Moroni lives in a cave in a primordial forest. The strapping fellow is the last surviving member of his clan, exterminated by Aaron, the King of a rival tribe. One day he comes across Bathsheba, a beautiful concubine who has escaped Aaron's clutches. He gives her shelter from the storm, and they gradually bond. But of course, the cruel Aaron isn't done with either of them.

From his name alone, you may recognize that this film's hero is based on a figure from The Book of Mormon. The last of that tome's prophets, Moroni is supposed to have stashed the gold plates on which it was written, and after his death is supposed to have revealed them, as an angel, to Joseph Smith near Palmyra, New York in 1823.

In this movie, he's played by director-co-writer Darin Scott, buffed and bearded and armored in a reasonable approximation of the Viggo Mortensen-Alexander Skarsgård mold, but with little sense of barbaric danger (despite some broadsword combat, the movie is only rated PG-13). He's a studly but saintly paragon; at one point Bathsheba playfully tells him "You are boring." She's not entirely wrong, alas--he murmurs his lines, and spends a lot of his footage meditating or gazing into the spiritual distance--but he has a dash of guileless, unassuming Mormon sweetness that makes him endearing anyway.

Besides, the heavies liven up the picture. Most amusing is Billy Zane as the rotten Aaron, belting out his lines from behind a Muppet-like ball of frizzy beard in what at times sounds for all the world like an Irish accent. Karina Lombard is formidable as a lethal archer, as is Eugene Brave Rock as Aaron's henchman. "Why fight for a soulless coward?" Moroni wails at them at one point; it struck me as a good question for the contemporary Republican party.

Whether any of this is scripturally accurate or doctrinally sound in LDS terms, I'm clearly in no position to say. But taken simply as a sword-and-sandal romance-adventure, the movie is pleasant, using breathtaking New York State locations to (mostly) belie its budget limitations. The first half is sort of slow going, and the New-Agey music gets a little oppressive at times, but when we finally get to the confrontation between hero and villains, it's pretty satisfying. It's certainly no sillier in any way that I could see than, say, Conan the Barbarian or the Lord of the Rings flicks. And it's at least as heartfelt.

G, SPOT ON

Now in theaters:

Godzilla Minus One--To paraphrase Yeats: What rough beast, its hour come round again, slouches toward Tokyo to kick ass?

Who else? This new kaiju flick, from Godzilla's home studio Toho, celebrates the title character's 70th anniversary. Released in the U.S. with minimal fanfare (no screening for critics in my area), this entry tells a standalone story, unrelated to the earlier Japanese or American films, and it feels very different from either series.

For one thing, it's a period piece. It begins in 1945, with Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze, first shirking his suicide mission, then freezing up when he's confronted with the supposedly legendary sea monster at a small airbase in the Odo Islands. This lapse results in horrifying losses. Then when Shikishima gets back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo he's a pariah in his neighborhood.

Over the next couple of years, the guilt-haunted Shikishima becomes the reluctant head of an improvised family after Noriko (Minami Hamake), a young homeless woman, takes shelter in his house with an orphaned baby she's picked up. To support them, he takes a job with an oddball minesweeping crew on a small boat, clearing the leftover mines surrounding Japan. Then one day The Big G surfaces, made gargantuan after being irradiated during the Bikini nuclear tests, and heads for Tokyo.

The monster scenes here are spectacular, staged by writer-director Takashi Yamazaki with panache and a feel for dizzying ponderousness. There are some genuine jolts, too, notably Godzilla's first appearance. Best of all, the behemoth's big scenes employ Akira Ifukube's masterly score from the original 1954 film.

But at some level Godzilla Minus One feels less about monster action and more about Japanese society struggling to come to terms with an almost unimaginable defeat. The big scaly guy seems more like a symbol of the magnitude of despondency that had to be overcome for the country to survive and rebuild. This, along with heartfelt acting from an appealing cast and an effective sense of period detail, makes the film unexpectedly moving.

Having a failed kamikaze as the hero set the story up for an obvious payoff that I found troubling from the first scenes of the film: The perceived need for redemption from the eminently sensible decision not to carry out the lunacy of a futile suicide mission. Here, I thought, is the sort of intractable nationalism that makes for good melodrama, but in real life leads countries into war and horror and misery.

I'm happy to say that G-1 is having none of it; while giving full credit to worthwhile self-sacrifice, the film is resolutely life affirming. "This country never changes," one of the characters mutters, about some governmental folly. "Maybe it can't." But that country did change, albeit at a Godzilla-sized price, and this movie gets at the pained yet exhilarating spirit of that change.

My Kid accompanied me to this film, and after checking out the trailer on the way to the theater, she disapprovingly said "I think they're going to hurt him," him being Godzilla. She was right; the monster is not, here, a long-suffering defender of humankind against some bizarre alien or primal abomination, but a rampaging destructive force who must be stopped. Even his roar sounds scarier; it's not the usual nasal, irritable honk. But even so, I too felt sympathy for him during the efforts to destroy him. Something about that big lizard is lovable, even when he's being a bad boy.